


that would have worked if you hadn't stopped me

by greenlily



Category: Bugs Potter - Gordon Korman, Macdonald Hall - Gordon Korman
Genre: Alternative Universe - Ghostbusters Fusion, Alternative Universe - Paranormal, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 22:38:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17150387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenlily/pseuds/greenlily
Summary: “Walton, you donot, and this is a professional opinion here, need any more caffeine.”





	that would have worked if you hadn't stopped me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aurum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aurum/gifts).



Then: January

It’s not until the third day that Adam finds the door. The first day had been for settling into the shared dorms of the college up the street and unloading all the gear off the opera company’s vast trucks. The second day is for orientation lectures, tours, safety this-and-that, and smaller orientation sessions for the individual intern teams. And on the third day Adam gets lost in the basement.

The walls down here move around, anyways. It’s really just a big empty space with corridors created out of enormous storage units on wheels. In some cities, there'd be people living down here, but Boston's not that bad yet.

There is someone moving the storage cases, though. Yuval sent him looking for the big one with the Star Wars bumper sticker three times on Sunday (what fucking dumbass packed all three of the cordless drills in a platform container? musta been one of the temps, boss) and it was in a different place every time. This time, he’s going too fast, with his arms full of music stand lights and power strips, and he takes a wrong turn at the call board and finds himself face-to-face with a piece of the north wall that used to be covered by a stack of flats but now isn't covered by anything, and where the flats were now there's a door.

He shuffles all the lights to his left arm and unhooks the pen from his belt with his free hand. The spring needs replacing, but the ink still flows in precise drops and dries to peel-off rubber in seconds. Adam backs slowly away from The Door, leaving a trail of tiny green dots that will glow when the lights go out. It'll still be there when he comes back.

It's nearly eleven at night before he makes it down there again. He sees a few of his glowing green dots in places where he didn't leave them, including one spot he isn't tall enough to reach, but there are still enough of them in a straight line to lead him where he wants to go.

If this was a horror movie, he’d be yelling at himself on the screen not to go through that door alone. But horror movies aren’t real. What’s real is that he’s in a strange city for two weeks working with people he doesn’t know. What’s real is that spending his winter break at a nice sensible internship surrounded by strangers sounds less and less appealing every time he remembers a handful of impossible days at a music festival with Bugs. What’s real is that Bugs almost never answers his e-mails these days, and his replies are short polite little things, very un-Bugslike. 

Compared to that, doing something completely impulsive and unwise feels almost familiar.

Adam opens the door, steps through, and props it with a chair (he’s read those books, okay, if you don’t leave the door open behind you then it’s your own fault when a scary woman picks you up and feeds you addictive candy). On the other side, there’s a corridor with white-painted brick walls and a cement floor. It’s lit by overhead bulbs in metal cages, not theatrical lights but normal ones like you’d use in your house.

He takes a few steps down the corridor. When nothing falls on his head or springs out of the walls, he moves more quickly. There are doors, all locked. It mostly looks like the corridors inside the walls of a shopping mall, where the cleaners can move around out of sight of the shoppers, and he wonders if this is some kind of access tunnel for the theater’s electricians or maybe the HVAC repair guys. It’s too narrow for moving scenery and equipment, but wherever this corridor goes, people are clearly using it.

It goes along straight, no branches right or left, and he’s about to write it off and go back to the theater basement, when one of the doors opens under his hand. It’s too dark to see anything in the room. The hallway is normal room temperature, but the air that wafts out of the opened door is chilly, and he reaches around for a light switch to see whether there’s a broken air vent or something. 

Cold fingers close over his wrist.

Adam tries to pull his hand away, but the fingers pull back and they’re stronger. He stumbles forward, more than half-dragged by whatever’s caught his arm. As soon as both his feet cross the threshold of the room, all the lights in the corridor outside go out at once.

The room had looked dark from outside, but now he can see a faint yellowish glow near one of the walls. He jerks his arm away again, and this time, whatever was holding him lets go. 

“Well, excuse _me_ ,” says a man’s voice. “You don’t have to be _rude_ about it.”

“Sorry about that,” Adam says absently, squinting to try and see better. He rubs his wrist. The guy’s fingers really are freezing. No wonder, if he’s been down here for long trying to fix the heat. “What’s wrong with the lights?”

“I don’t know what you’re saying, man,” says the guy. “I can see just fine.” And, indeed, the yellowish glow is getting brighter. Some kind of motion-activated work light? Adam turns around to look.

The yellowish glow is getting brighter because, in addition to the wall, the guy himself is glowing. He’s young, a few years older than Adam, wearing jeans and a tie-dye shirt and glasses. 

Well, glass. Half of his face is missing.

“Sorry about grabbing you, man,” says the half of the guy’s mouth that’s more or less still there. “It’s just been a really long while since I’ve seen anyone down here.” 

He holds out his hands. They’re the fleshless bones of a skeleton.

The lights go on in the corridor then, and Adam runs and doesn’t look back. His feet skid in the dust that was definitely not there before, and each caged lightbulb goes dark as he passes under it. When he reaches the door to the theater basement, he’s going so fast that he and the chair tumble through the doorway together. By the time he untangles himself and looks back, the door is gone.

Adam doesn’t go to the basement alone for the rest of the two weeks. Brochures from Hudson and Miskatonic and Quinobequin join the look-books from Juilliard and Oberlin in his college applications box. His Internet search history can best be described as very, very strange.

Bugs doesn’t answer his last e-mail.

Adam doesn’t write again.

 

Now: April

You've heard this one before. A butterfly flaps its wings, and there's a hurricane in Thailand. China. Wherever. Anyways. Point is, big things can be started--touched off, if you will--by little things. Raindrops on roses. Very small rocks. A door.

The door that touches off the Next Thing in Adam’s life is on the second floor of Building 4. Black wooden door. Pebble glass. Double locks. On the pebble glass it says "Department of Alchemy". What it really is, behind the door, is the Department of Bruno.

Bruno is technically Dr. Walton, PhD. He's a stocky guy with Leafs tattoos and a dubious goatee. He teaches some classes, lectures, advises a bunch of undecided undergraduates who think they might want to become members of the Department of Parapsychology. Mostly, though, what Bruno does is hang around in his office and read, and build stuff, and wait for people to come in and tell him things. 

Everybody at Quinobequin University has the word, and the word is this: If you have no fucking idea what it is, go tell Bruno about it. Bruno thrives on the inexplicable, unprovable, and frequently irreproducible.

If Bruno gives you the lock combo, you can open the unmarked door across the hall. This is more or less the Department of Adam and Boots. Dr. Melvin O’Neal (Linguistics) and Dr. Adam Webb (Applied Folklore) do have real offices, of course. Sort of. The research conducted by Drs. Webb and O’Neal has less practical application than the University is entirely pleased with. So they share some workspace with some grad students over in Buildings 11 (Adam) and 25 (Boots). And then they come over and do their real work here. 

It is not actually Bruno’s experiments, in the end, that earn the three of them a close encounter with the pavement on Massachusetts Avenue. Plain old departmental politics do them in. Bruno’s hold on his office and lab had been fairly tenuous to begin with, being inherited very unofficially from the elderly professor whose last postdoc he'd been. After eight years, the three of them had kind of gotten to thinking that the Department of Alchemy was theirs for good. 

It's never nice to be wrong. However, it was perhaps not strictly necessary for Bruno to take a swing at the Dean of Undergraduate Studies when he came to tell them their luck had run out. Boots maybe didn't need to say things about the Dean's mother either, at least not those things, and maybe not quite so loud, but honestly he had no idea the Dean spoke Czech. 

Whatever the causes, the effect is that the three of them are at this moment sitting on the University’s main outdoor staircase like abandoned pre-frosh. They have bruises. Bruno has scraped knuckles. They have a combined sense of monumental unfairness. They have--

"We have a room full of stuff back there. Plus Bruno’s office," says Boots. And waits.

Bruno reaches over and taps Adam’s kneecap. "Relocation of resources, Webb. Your specialty."

Adam sighs. This is an old, old joke. Adam does not have any particular gifts in the area of moving things around. What he has, is cousins. Specifically, a whole fleet of cousins spread out all over Eastern Massachusetts who specialize in taking things from one place to another. Some of these things may or may not technically belong to the cousins. Another thing Adam does not have, right now, is a lot of room for moral outrage. 

He fishes out his cell and sends a text to a 781 area code. A few minutes later, he gets a message back. And a few minutes after that, an elderly Saturn full of assorted Webbs pulls into the bus stop. It's followed by a battered blue van driven by Adam’s second cousin Stefanie. Several cars honk at the Webbs, and some drivers make some hand gestures. None of the Webbs take any notice.

Stef hops out of the van and comes over to sit on the stairs between Adam and Boots. Several passing proto-parapsychologists regard her with interest. She ignores them and reaches over to give Adam a quick hug.

"Uncle Leo said you needed a crew and a ride. You can keep the van for a while, he doesn't need it right now. What's up?" 

Adam takes a deep breath. While he's figuring out what to do with it, Bruno speaks up. "We're leaving the University. This place has grown too small to hold us."

Stef looks over at Bruno and gives him a deliberate up-and-down stare, all Internet-five-foot-ten of him. Then she smiles. He smiles back bigger.

"All right," says Adam. "Thank you, Dr. Walton." He turns back to Stef. "Actually, they finally got around to canceling our research grants. Seems they noticed we were producing more questions than answers."

Stef makes Sad Face. She's younger than Adam, born when he was almost old enough to babysit, and he never could stand that expression. "It's not that bad," he hears himself say. "We'd been planning to use our powers for good, sooner or later. I guess it's sooner, is all."

The smile Bruno flashed for Adam’s cute cousin is nothing compared to the one he produces now. It can probably be seen from space.

\-----

Whatever its provenance, Uncle Leo’s big blue van solves both their transportation and storage problems for the moment. Adam’s cousins load the last few boxes into the back while Boots takes a last quick look through both offices. The last thing they need is for the U to send them a bill for damaged facilities as a fuck-you-and-goodbye.

Stef hugs Adam again and pulls back to look at him. “It’s gonna be okay,” she tells him seriously. “Like, really hard, but okay. Text somebody when you find a place, and we’ll be back to move the stuff.” She hands him the keys and jogs over to evict a too-young-to-drive cousin from behind the wheel of the Saturn.

Bruno looks at him. “Is that a premonition?”

“No. She just believes in being positive.”

“That was positive?”

“Yeah. If she thought we were screwed, she’d have wished me good luck.”

Boots comes down the stairs towards them. The thing about Boots is, Bruno lives and breathes for the weird and wacky, but for almost two decades Boots has lived and breathed for Bruno, and as a side benefit he has become an expert in What Could Possibly Go Wrong. If our world is crumbling around us, Boots is the guy sweeping up the crumbles. And then he’s the guy scrubbing out the cracks in the floor with stiff brushes and bleach just to make sure there’s no spontaneous crumble regeneration.

(Spontaneous crumble regeneration is absolutely not a thing. If it was, Bruno and Boots would have found out about it by now.)

“The rooms are clear,” says Boots. “Now we just need to update our API licenses, and find a new office. With--” he eyes the van uneasily “--affordable large-vehicle parking.”

Bruno looks over at Adam. “Good luck.”

\-----

Adam’s apartment has two point five bedrooms and one point five bathrooms and he gets a break on the rent because he shovels snow for the landlords. Bruno and Boots pay way too much for a crappy studio, way the hell over on the other side of the River where the conservatory students live, because back when they came here from Toronto neither of them knew any better and after that they couldn’t be bothered to move.

The three of them spend the next day scribbling numbers on graph paper and swearing at their laptops a lot. If Bruno and Boots break their lease and move into Adam’s place, the three of them can, just barely, afford one of the sketchy one-room offices listed for rent on Craigslist with suspiciously bad spelling.

“Very film-noir,” says Bruno tentatively, opening a door somewhere above an Arlington insurance agency that hasn’t changed its front-door signage since roughly 1955.

“Very small,” says Boots. “Very illegal wiring. Very lacking a bathroom. Very short of lab space.”

“Very short of _parking_ ,” Adam points out, and they move on.

They land up at a coffeehouse called Fred’s, around the corner from Adam’s apartment, and park the van not-exactly-legally in the space out front that has FRED spray-painted in bright green on the asphalt. 

Miraculously, there is a free table in the corner where there are enough outlets for three laptops. “My turn,” says Bruno, and attaches himself to the end of the line for the espresso bar. Boots watches him. Adam watches Boots.

“How’s that working out for you?” says Adam quietly. Boots makes an irritated noise and turns back to his laptop.

Bruno and Boots have been best friends since whatever Canadian boarding schools have instead of seventh grade. They’ve been roommates since they were twelve--like, actually sharing a bedroom. No one else has ever been able to get their attention for more than a few weeks.

Adam’s seen how they look at each other when they think the other one isn’t watching. If falling in love is ice cream, then normal romance is that crappy low-calorie fro-yo and what Bruno and Boots have is Haagen-Dazs. And yet, he is equally sure that in all these years, they’ve never so much as platonically huddled for warmth (which is truly amazing, because, again, _Canada_ ).

Sometimes he wonders, idly, if this whole thing they have going is just the world’s longest experiment in whether unresolved sexual tension registers on a PKE meter.

Bruno comes back to the table with three lattes, two scones, one apple, and a tired-looking guy in a Fred’s apron.

Bruno tips his head at the Fred’s guy. “This is Ray. He has a question about our van.”

“Raymond,” says the guy. “Jardine. Big Blue, out front? That’s yours?”

“Yeah. Sorry. I’ll go move it.” Adam pushes his chair back from the table.

“No, wait.” Raymond holds up one hand in a stop gesture. “I was actually going to ask, could you leave it there?”

Adam blinks. “Can I ask why?”

“The guy who runs the smoothie place across the street keeps trying to rent our parking space, and he won’t take no for an answer.” Raymond smiles, thin and mean. “I would _love_ for his hippie vegan douchebros to have to look at an enormous gas-guzzling dinosaur every time they come by for their daily dose of wheatgrass and smug.”

Boots raises his hand. “I’m a vegan.”

“Do you hang out on the sidewalk and hassle teenaged girls because they happen to work at non-vegan coffeehouses?”

“Um. No.”

“Then we’re good.”

“We can leave the van there for a little while,” Adam says. “But we’re working on finding office space, and when we do, we’re probably going to need to park it near there.”

“Oh.” Raymond brightens. “There’s a space upstairs. We took it off Craigslist because we kept getting spammed. You interested?”

“Maybe.” Bruno looks over at Boots, who shrugs. “Can we see it?”

Raymond leads them out the front door and around the corner to a separate entrance. A steep flight of stairs takes them up to a big empty space with a ceiling fan and a couple of old wooden tables and some folding chairs. One wall has a bunch of spray-painted symbols in bright green.

Adam taps Bruno’s shoulder and points at the green symbols. “Anything we should know about?”

Bruno takes a few steps back and squints. “Nope. Just graffiti. Boots?”

“Someone really likes a guy named...Vitaly Chernobyl? That can’t be right. Anyways, it’s fine.”

Raymond raises his eyebrows. “Anything _I_ should know about?”

“Oh. Right,” says Bruno. “We’re APIs. Certified and insured through the New England chapter. Academic licenses right now, but that’ll get updated to Independent as soon as we have a permanent business address.”

“Level 3,” Adam puts in hastily. “Bruno’s taking the L4 exam next year, but we’re not going to be doing any detention or storage. Strictly catch-and-release.” 

If it was up to Adam, they would be strictly release-and-release, no trapping at all. None of the spirits that make themselves known to him, with the possible exception of that first guy in the basement back in high school, have any interest in hanging around. Sometimes, though, they’re too dangerous to leave running loose once they know Adam can see them. Bruno and a flock of undergrads from the Physics Department have spent a lot of all-nighters working on temporary shelters into which Adam can coax the wayward ghosts for a few days of peace until Boots can find or build the right incantation to send them along permanently. 

Right now, they have something that looks kind of like a shoebox-sized horizontal Rolodex with half-size sheets of music staff paper instead of cards, currently stashed under the jump seat of Big Blue and carefully wedged between boxes of textbooks. It takes a fairly large amount of power to recharge it, which is why Boots is kneeling under one of the tables looking very carefully at the curiously oversized electrical outlets.

Raymond looks in his direction. “It should be fine, um, hello? Vegan guy?”

“Boots. O’Neal.” Boots pokes at one of the outlets and makes a satisfied noise.

“...Anyways. This whole building used to be a recording studio. The wiring’s set up for some pretty heavy power demands.” Raymond lowers his his voice. “Is his name seriously Boots?”

“Nickname got stuck on him when we were kids.” Bruno’s voice is fond. “It’s seriously Melvin. But that was a little too serious, even for him.” He wanders over to look at the outlet.

Raymond’s eyes go from Bruno, to Boots, to Bruno again, and then to the ceiling. “Perfect. Send Jardine a pair of pining nerds to rent his attic. Vegan nerds, even. Just what I need.”

“Not a vegan!” calls Bruno from under the table.

Adam blinks and looks again, but whoever Raymond’s talking to, they’re not interested in letting Adam see them.

Boots comes over. “This looks perfect. What are you asking for it?” 

The amount Raymond names is absurdly low, especially considering that it includes the parking space out front. 

“You sure?” Boots narrows his eyes. “Do you want to check in with the owner and get back to us?”

“I _am_ the owner,” Raymond says. “Fred is eighty-four and lives in Fort Lauderdale. He hired me to manage the place when I was an undergrad and sold it to me for a song when he moved south. Told me to pass it along when I could. We’re doing okay, so, now I can. You want the place or not?”

They want the place. Boots follows Raymond downstairs to the back office to look at the paperwork, and Bruno trails after to pick up their stuff from the corner table with all the outlets. Adam takes one more look at the ceiling--still nothing--and sends a text to Stefanie:

WE GOT ONE

 

\-----

Boots and Stef and several enthusiastic teenagers haul everything out of Big Blue and up the two flights of stairs. Bruno starts unpacking the reference books and checking angles for his latest mirrors-and-lenses contraption. Raymond provides large pitchers of watery iced tea (“Walton, you do _not_ , and this is a professional opinion here, need any more caffeine.”) and kicks espresso-curious cousins off the La Marzocco.

Adam superintends the unloading and placement of his spider plant collection (Doris, Morris, Horace, Aragog, and Spike). When that’s done, he heads back downstairs and parks his laptop on the corner table that had brought them luck last time. There are a number of available wireless networks (including one named RAY JARDINE ROT IN HELL) but all of them are locked. He types out a text and hears a ping from across the room where Raymond is behind the cash register.

//awebb: what’s our wifi?  
//jardine: fch0314 pw is freds4life  
//awebb: thanks.

He starts with Twitter, because who wouldn’t, and gets stuck. They do not, technically, have a name for their business yet. This is largely because they don’t have a name for what they actually do. They are APIs, in that they’re licensed by (and dues-paying members of) the Association of Paranormal Investigators, but that covers a lot of ground. “This guy who sees ghosts and plays the flute until they chill out, another guy who figures out the right words to help them get where they’re going, and then there’s this third guy who’s just into a lot of really weird shit and somehow most of it becomes useful at some point” has never really lent itself to a job description.

//awebb: building our brand. any thoughts on a name?  
//macdhall4ever: ohcrap make seomhting up :)  
//boots: I thought about it, but nothing jumped out at me.  
//boots: Something with API, I guess, so they know we’re licensed.  
//boots: Other than that, whatever you come up with is fine.

Adam thinks about it for a moment. He absently brushes the screen on his phone, and Raymond’s text comes up, showing the password: FREDS4LIFE.

He smiles and starts typing.

\-----

//awebb hey, when you get a chance, change the wifi pw.  
//jardine why what did you do webb  
//awebb nothing. just, do it?

\-----

Now: May

They get plenty of Tweets, but the Facebook page Adam had set up as an afterthought turns out to be their best source for legitimate jobs. A few are for violent or destructive hauntings, which they refer immediately to the regional API office near South Station. The regional office has teams of trained armsmen and -women, and proper detention facilities, not to mention a priest on call if things take a turn for the exorcisable.

In fairness, the South Station office does expedite the transfer of their API licenses from Academic to Independent status, and they start sending referrals to the Fred Squad in return. At first it’s just tiny things where deploying even a single, unarmed, Level 4 would be like swatting a fly with a Buick. However, someone over there apparently understands the concept of the right tool for the right job, because eventually the referrals start to be things like “We showed up and whatever’s there isn’t dangerous, just sad, and we noticed you break a lot fewer things than we do, so maybe you can go check it out.”

After a couple of weeks of that, the Freds are in a good enough joint financial condition that Bruno and Boots could probably afford to start looking for their own place again. Neither of them bring it up.

\---

Somewhere in there, Adam finds himself wondering if Raymond Jardine would be any good in bed.

One evening after the night-shift baristas show up, Raymond puts a hand on his waist and invites him for the kind of drink Fred’s isn’t licensed to serve, and several hours after that he gets to find out. The answer proves to be a qualified yes, allowing for simultaneous over-caffeination and sleep dep. It’s not an unpleasant experience, but also not one Adam feels particularly compelled to repeat.

Sleeping with your landlord isn’t usually a good idea, especially if you don’t discuss beforehand whether you intend for it to be a one-time thing. Raymond takes Adam’s polite decline of a repeat offer philosophically, which is to say he issues the usual eye-rolling complaint to his usual and still-unseen buddy (or possibly to the Universe at large) and wanders off to take a phone call from a flavored-syrup supplier. 

Adam sees him later that day flirting with a blonde girl in a Great Big Sea T-shirt while he pours her double espresso over ice, so he’s pretty sure Raymond is fundamentally okay. After a day or two, he’s pretty sure that he and Raymond, collectively, are also okay, except now Raymond occasionally gets sort of gruffly solicitous of all three of them and tells them to be careful when they head out on a job. It becomes part of the background noise of life at, or upstairs from, Fred’s.

\---

 

Adam climbs the stairs to their office one day and finds Bruno and Boots staring at a thumb drive as though it might explode. 

“Guys?”

Boots waves a hand at him to shush. He waits.

Finally, Bruno glances at his phone, and both of them exhale. “Okay. Sorry,” says Bruno. “Mala told us it should be safe after six minutes but we could wait eight minutes if we wanted to be extra-safe.”

That part makes sense--Boots is basically the avatar of extra-safe, so they were waiting for eight minutes to run out, or possibly ten--but doesn’t get Adam anywhere. Mala is the linguistics expert in the API office near South Station. “Safe for what? I hope you’re not letting that anywhere near your laptop.”

“Nope.” Boots holds up a battle-scarred white MacBook. “Quarantined from everything and included in the job. Sent over by courier.”

Whoa. The South Station office does _not_ like trusting anything offsite. They needed Adam to tell whether a music box had a spirit bound in it last year, and he had to go down to Summer Street to look at it. If they’re willing to send this one to the Freds, the physical item is less valuable than the amount of damage it might cause to Mala’s lab if it goes badly.

“Well.” Boots sighs. “This is what they insure us for. Let’s go.” He opens the laptop, squints at his phone screen for a password and plugs in the thumb drive. The screen lights up and plays that weird not-quite-C-chord _bong_ Adam remembers from computers when he was a little kid. Bruno reads what sounds like a random string of numbers off his own phone screen. Boots keys them in, and the screen fills with lines of text.

Bruno squints at the screen. “That...is not English.” He turns his head one way, and then the other. “Or Russian. Or...wait, is it Greek?”

“No.” Adam leans over Boots’ shoulder. “Boots, why did Mala send us a thumb drive of a document in Elvish and treat it like a contaminated artifact?”

“Tengwar,” says Boots prissily. “And, fuck if I know.”

“What does it say?” Bruno has never seriously entertained the possibility that a language exists that Boots doesn’t know. At least not where anyone has heard him. Adam is beginning to have some questions about that boarding school of theirs.

 

“Hang on. There are a couple of READMEs.” Boots opens the first document. “Mala says, this is encoded in Tengwar but what it is is a constructed language someone sent them. It’s called…” The words that come out of his mouth aren’t in English. The part of Adam’s brain that remembers his high school French registers it as--

“-- _coeur maligne_? Is that even a thing?”

“No.” Bruno doesn’t speak as many languages as Boots, and he can’t pick them apart and build new things like Boots can, but his French is very boots-on-the-ground functional. “Like, if you needed to talk about cardiac tumors you could use those words and someone would probably understand you? But it’s not a real phrase. It’s like if you were a fifteen-year-old goth and you wanted to come up with a French name for your Tumblr sideblog about the dark poetry of your soul.”

“Yeah,” says Boots, staring at the screen. “About that. This drive was confiscated from a high school in Seattle. Mala knows someone in the PNW regional offices and they sent it over to her. It had a note attached saying not to...read it aloud outside a controlled environment? The fuck?”

Adam looks around. Their office is still basically a big empty space with the same furniture it had when they arrived. There are stacks of books on every table and large parts of the floor, and all of the boxes the books came in are sort of haphazardly stacked in a corner because they haven’t had time to do anything with them. For reasons known only to God and Bruno, the mirrors-and-lenses apparatus has migrated two tables over and appears to be engaged in sexual congress with at least three of Adam’s spider plants.

“Well,” says Bruno finally. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

Adam swats him on the shoulder. “Dude. Reading the scroll out loud can zap you _and_ destroy the spell. Don’t they teach you this stuff in Canada?”

“Dungeons and Dragons is not a substitute for a valid scientific method,” Boots tells him. He tabs back to the Tengwar file. “Okay, here goes.”

The words that come out of Boots’ mouth sound a lot like French and German, and a little bit like Italian, and a little bit like Hebrew, which more than exhausts Adam’s knowledge of non-English languages. However, he has seen all of the Harry Potter movies many times, and it mostly sounds like someone took the movie version of Parseltongue and turned it 90 degrees.

Horace the Spider Plant, his tendrils lovingly wrapped around part of a deconstructed microscope, makes a sad little slithering noise and wilts comprehensively.

“Um,” says Boots. “...Sorry?”

“Holy shit.” Bruno sounds appalled. “They took this away from some _high school kids_?”

Adam can mourn for his dead plant later. Right now, they need to help Mala and her team figure out what in God’s name goes on in Seattle.

 

Now: June

Midsummer’s Day, blazing hot, and the ceiling fan’s not doing a thing to help. Bruno, Boots and Adam are getting called now on so many jobs that their collective sleep deficit is becoming a serious problem. They really need another person, at least part-time, but they don’t have a spare minute to interview anyone.

They come back in from their third call before mid-afternoon and Raymond waves at them frantically from behind the espresso bar. A long line of people glare at them as Bruno nudges his way to the front and stands on his toes to meet Raymond’s eyes.

“Here.” Raymond digs in the pocket of his Fred’s apron and comes up with a scrap of yellow lined notepaper. “A woman came by about an hour ago. Said she needs to see you in person.” He squints at the paper. “Diana Grint?”

Boots chokes slightly, takes the paper from Raymond and passes it to Bruno and Adam without looking at it. Raymond’s handwriting looks like he was holding the pen in his teeth while he pulled espresso shots with both hands, but Adam can read it clearly enough. “Diane Grant”. A Watertown street address. 

The fourth line just says “Help.”

Boots is already on his way out the door. “Explain?” says Adam, following Bruno to the van.

“Diane Grant is an old friend of ours from the Hall.” Boots starts Big Blue’s engine. “We haven’t heard from her in a while.”

“Oh, tell truth and shame the devil,” says Bruno sardonically. “Diane Grant _was_ an old friend of ours from the Hall. We haven’t heard from her since her mother posted on Diane’s Facebook page to say that if any Eyelight freaks showed up at Diane’s wedding, she would call the police to arrest them. Or, you know, _us_.”

They make the rest of the drive in silence, and Adam just kind of sits with that for a while. Everybody knows there are people out there who don’t believe in the paranormal, but you never think you’ll actually meet one. It’s like meeting a homophobe, or someone who thinks the government faked the Moon landing back in the day. “Eyelight” is a _very_ old insult for people with paranormal abilities, something his grandparents might have heard back when people still thought telepaths could read your mind if you made eye contact.

If Bruno and Boots have been friends with someone who comes from an old-school headblind family...wow. Adam can’t read minds, tested an absolute flatline on the Cumberland Scale four separate times, but he doesn’t need to be telepathic to follow the rest of Bruno’s thoughts. He and Boots haven’t spoken to this Diane in a long time. If she’s contacting them now and asking them for help, it’s really bad.

The street address takes them to a slightly shabby Victorian a couple of blocks away from the high school. The three of them climb the stairs to the porch. Before they can ring the bell, a very small person runs out of the doorway at top speed and crashes into Adam’s kneecap with a noise that sounds like _bonk_.

"Ow." The little girl rubs her forehead and stares accusingly up at Adam. "You're pointy."

"Actually, I'm Adam," says Adam.

She scowls up at him. “You’re not funny.”

Someone bellows from inside. "Catherine Victoria _Webster_!"

Adam looks down at his new girlfriend. "Is that you?" Instead of answering, she throws her arms around his knees in a death-grip hug and hangs on.

The owner of the bellow appears in the doorway. He has glasses and blond hair and a walking cast on his left foot. "You can't just run out in the street like that. Come back inside. Your uncle Dave’s on the phone."

“Hi,” says Boots warily. “We got a message asking us to come by. From Diane Grant?”

“Mommy went to jail,” says Adam’s kneecap limpet.

“Diane had to meet with a client at Walpole. You must be Bruno and Boots and....”

“Adam Webb.” Adam automatically puts out a hand.

The guy’s eyes widen, and he smiles broadly. “Mike Webster,” the guy says, shaking Adam’s hand. “I’m so glad to meet you. Come on in. This is Katy.”

Katy lets go of Adam, which is good because he's feeling like he’s got a hornet sitting on his arm that he doesn't dare wave away in case it stings him. She runs past Mike and down the hallway, trailed by Bruno and Adam at a fast walk, and lands up in a yellow-painted kitchen with stairs going up from one corner. There’s an open door to a half-bathroom, and another door that’s closed. The floor is scattered with dried mud and plaster dust. There's a cell phone and a laptop lying on the big table in the middle, and some chairs around it.

There is also the back half of a person sticking out of the cabinet under the sink. In Adam’s reasonably expert opinion, it is a female person who has a remarkably flexible spine.

"I know those tiny footstomps." The voice on the speaker is male and shouting a little over some kind of background noise.

Adam recognizes it immediately.

"Katy, honey, what's the problem?" the phone continues.

"Dad’s trying to make me go upstairs," yells Katy. "I do not need a nap."

"You really kind of do," says a voice from under the sink.

The speaker huffs. “Shut up, Cathy. Now, Katy, you know you're hurting your dad’s feelings."

Katy sticks out her tongue at the cell phone and blows a giant raspberry. “Saying shut up is mean. _You’re_ hurting _Aunty Cathy’s_ feelings.” Katy’s dad, looking at the tiny drops of kid-spit on his cell phone, doesn’t look hurt so much as murderous.

" _Catherine_." The speaker’s voice sharpens. "I'm going to count to five. One...two...three...three and a half..."

"No." Katy kicks the table, and the laptop shuffles over a bit. Mike squawks and grabs at it. Katy kicks again. "All the good stuff is happening down here. I don't wanna go upstairs. I don't need a nap."

"...Four..."

"NO!" 

The voice under the sink does some kind of complex back-out-and-straighten-up maneuver and lands on her feet, covered with dust and spiderwebs, a C-wrench in her left hand. Adam recognizes her immediately. The last time he saw her, she was wearing a Great Big Sea T-shirt and Raymond Jardine was fluttering his eyelashes and pouring her a double espresso. 

"Why is there so much noise? Katy? What?"

Katy immediately quits kicking the table. "Naps are for babies. I'm not a baby."

"Oh good," says Sink Person--Cathy? "Then you can come help me. I was just thinking I needed someone little to crawl under the counter. There’s this pipe in the back that I can’t reach.”

"Ew." Katy’s Yuck Face is comprehensive. "It’s gross under there. There’s spiders."

The speakerphone has gone silent, but Adam can hear “Uncle Dave” breathing.

"Fair point," says Cathy, still calm. "Grab the broom. If you're too old for naps, you're old enough to start helping out."

"The floor’s only dirty ‘cause _you_ made a mess," says Katy. She's slumping over the table a little bit, and the last word gets cut off by a giant yawn.

"Yeah." Mike reaches out and plucks her off the chair. Boots catches it before it tips over. "C'mon. We'll go up and listen to Sergeant Pepper. Naps are for babies, but music breaks are for everybody. All right?" 

Katy nods and drops her head on his skinny shoulder ( _bonk_ ) (“ow…”). Mike chuckles and limps up the back stairs with an armful of crabby daughter.

As soon as they’re out of sight, Cathy’s placid persona falls away like a dog shaking off water. She drops the wrench and throws herself into Boots’ arms. Bruno closes in behind her and wraps around them both, and the three of them just stand there in a shivering tangle of indistinguishable arms and legs. Adam picks up the broom and starts sweeping, something to do so he won’t have to look at what he’s pretty sure he isn’t meant to see.

“It’s been too long,” murmurs Cathy, her voice muffled by a broad vegan shoulder, or possibly a Leafs tattoo. “Wanted to call you before, but Diane said you wouldn’t come.”

“I’m not sure we would have,” says Boots quietly. “Not if we thought we were making her choose.” Bruno makes a wordless noise of agreement.

“She left them,” says the voice on the phone speaker. “Diane. She stopped talking to her family, a year before Katy was born. Mike’s mom kind of adopted her right after the wedding, anyways.”

“Oh!” Cathy untangles herself and straightens her shoulders. “Shit. I’m sorry. I thought you hung up. Everyone, this,” she waves at the phone, “is Dave Potter. Dave, these are Bruno and Boots from Macdonald Hall, and…” She looks at Adam.

“Adam Webb.” Adam keeps his voice even, _even_ , he’s not a singer but damned if he doesn’t have enough breath control for this. “From the flute section. Hi, Bugs.”

\-----

It turns out that Mike teaches middle-school band, and that he and Bugs were roommates at Berklee (the music school in Boston where you can major in Rock Star, not the university in California that Bruno swears he never even thought about applying to.) Hence, Bugs’ honorary uncle status and Mike’s warm reception. 

Adam is beginning to suspect that Mike has his very own Bugs or Bruno tucked away somewhere in his past, a barely-remembered melody upon which Adam’s Bugs is at best a skillfully crafted variation. He wonders if Diane knows.

Cathy, whose last name is Burton, proves to be Diane’s roommate from Macdonald Hall days. Adam’s pretty sure she used to be Boots’ girlfriend at some point, a fact which seems to bother exactly nobody. These days, apparently, she lives near Watertown Square and does something with communications for the Boston Fire Department. 

Bugs has moved from speakerphone to Skype, Cathy and the Freds are clustered around the table taking turns on camera, and the resulting four-and-a-half-way conversation is getting loud enough to threaten Katy’s nap. Adam is the half, because he’s still not sure if he can talk to Bugs around the large and spiky object lodged in his larynx. Mike is unloading the dishwasher with one eye on an enormous pot of pasta and the other on the baby monitor, and that’s how Diane finds them.

Mike is laughing. Bruno is laughing. Boots is laughing. Cathy is laughing. Diane is probably laughing, but there are all these other people hugging her so it’s a little hard to tell. Adam looks over to the laptop screen, and the smile fades from Bugs’ face.

“It’s good to see you,” says Bugs tentatively. “Been a while.”

“Yeah.” Adam manages, just barely, not to snap that that is not his fault. Bugs at early-thirty-mumble looks pretty much like he had at sixteenish, all arms and legs and curly dark hair. Based on the length of the hair, Adam suspects that Bugs hasn’t gone into a professional field that would take him all that far from the music business. 

“Look.” Bugs runs a hand backwards through his hair, and oh, Adam remembers that gesture. “This isn’t the time, but we need to talk. I’m coming into town tomorrow, are you going to be around?”

“I’ll be here,” says Adam quickly, and gets himself the hell away from the laptop camera before he says anything stupid. That little bit of the back of his neck that always buzzed pleasantly when Bugs was around is twitching, and Bugs isn’t even here yet.

They all land up in chairs around the table, eventually, with Bugs on-screen pointed towards the end of the table where Bruno, Cathy, and Diane have squashed their chairs together to try and fit on camera. Adam finds himself following Mike around the kitchen collecting glasses, forks, wine, juice, paper towels in place of both napkins and placemats. (“We’re real formal ‘round these parts,” says Mike dryly.)

Mike spoons out big bowls of elbows with some kind of eggplant tomato sauce. Adam showers his with cheese and re-tunes his brain to Radio Freds.

“Okay, good,” says Diane. “Katy’s going to be waking up soon, and we need to make some headway on this before she does.”

“Someone want to fill me in?” Boots tastes his pasta and adds pepper. “You guys got about three sentences into ‘oh fuck, this looks like Charm’ before you lost me.”

Look, Adam tries to be a good person. He does. He gives people his seat on the T, he donates regularly to the New England API’s survivor funds, and he works really, really hard on not being prejudiced.. He especially tries not to judge people just because they can do (or because they _are_ , no one’s really sure) something that freaks him out personally.

Charm is...yeah. Charm freaks Adam out a little. More than a little. If a person who has Charm decides to use it on you, and you’re not protected, you’ll find yourself promising to give that person anything they ever want, for the rest of their life. If you’re lucky, they’ll take it off after they get whatever they’re after. If you’re not lucky? People have lost fortunes, houses, political positions. People have committed murder. Charm is bad shit.

Bugs has more than a little of it, especially with a pair of drumsticks in his hands, and whenever that thought crosses Adam’s mind he chases it firmly with _Bugs only uses his powers for good_ and corners both thoughts firmly in a mental wardrobe and slams the door shut and they can just stay in there. Scary lady with the candy, bring it on.

“So yeah,” Bugs says, “Your kid is definitely a Charmer.” The capital letter is unmistakable.

Adam shoves his chair back so fast it falls over.

\-----

 

His money would have been on Boots, but it’s actually Cathy who comes out to the porch to perch on the railing beside him. They sit there for a while.

“She’s only three,” Cathy says at last. 

_Catherine_ , thinks Adam. _Katy’s named after her._ “How long before she’s…”

“Dangerous?” Cathy finishes when he trails off. “Have you ever met a little kid? They want what they want when they want it. She’s dangerous right now. But there are ways around that. That’s not even why Diane called you guys.”

Adam turns to look at her. “It gets worse?”

“You could say that.” Cathy sighs. “Come on. She’s probably awake by now, and the sooner we can start getting you three desensitized to the effects, the better.”

\-----

“Desensitized to the effects” turns out to be a scientific version of “the more time you spend with her while she’s this young, the less likely it is she can Charm you when she gets older”. Even after her nap, Katy proves to be reassuringly abrasive, exactly as Adam remembers Stefanie and her sisters being at this age and without any of the studied innocence that Charm-gifted kids have in bad movies. After a few minutes, Adam’s skin doesn’t even crawl any more. Much.

“Five minutes till bedtime, kiddo,” says Diane. Katy reaches into an overstuffed bookshelf and extracts a tattered copy of _Goodnight Moon_. She has manifestly lost her heart to Bruno already, and now she climbs into his lap and holds up the book with a hopeful expression. 

Being Bruno, he obliges with a dramatic reading that provokes cascades of giggles like tiny golden bells. It occurs to Adam that influence can be exercised through sound--after all, when he plays his flute to soothe restless ghosts he’s basically Charming them, even if it is with their willing participation. He looks around to see if anyone else finds the pose a little too staged, Katy’s laughter just a little too sweet. All he sees is tolerant smiles from her parents, and an expression on Boots’ face that he almost certainly does not mean for anyone else to see. Whatever Cathy’s “worse” means, this isn’t it.

Once Katy’s tucked into bed, her parents and Cathy and the Freds gather around the kitchen table again. Before he can stop himself, Adam glances at the laptop.

“He’s on his way..” Mike hands him a cup of coffee. “When he gets here, he’s sitting in on an EP for some guys from the Stark Sands who are doing a side project kind of thing? After that...I don’t know. Waiting for the next thing to find him.”

“He’ll be here tomorrow, right?” Adam did _not_ mean to say that out loud. 

“We can’t wait until tomorrow to talk about this,” Cathy says, and the smile slides off Diane’s face like raindrops down a window. She and Mike glance at each other, and their fingers lace together on top of the table.

“You’re right.” Diane sighs. “Dave was the one who figured it out, but he gave us the go-ahead to start now and fill him in later.”

Adam is clearly missing something here. “Fill him in on what? Ow, dammit!” Judging from Bruno’s sharp kick under the table, whatever he is missing is important.

“You never studied.” Boots’ glance is both pitying and contemptuous. “What’s the most dangerous thing about Charmed kids?”

“They can make people do what they want. _Whatever_ they want.”

“It’s not what they want, Adam.” Boots’ face is so serious it’s almost blank. “It’s what wants them. Those spirits that don’t bother coming around you because they don’t want to move on? They want to move _here_ , and children with Charm are frequently the door.”

\-----

Diane and Mike put Katy to bed, and come back downstairs with an extra power strip so they can all plug in their phones. Cathy makes pot after pot of strong black tea which none of them like and all of them wind up drinking. Bruno and Boots open a million tabs on their laptops, and they and Cathy poke at them and yell at each other a lot in whispers.

Adam has lost track of when this day starts. He loses track of when it ends. Midsummer’s Day is the Longest Day, that’s 101 stuff, everyone knows that, even idiot flute-guys who should have stayed in the flute section and should have gone to Oberlin and should never, ever have gotten themselves mixed up in anything where they would have to find out that adorable little girls can be _in_ danger and can _be_ danger and...oh, fuck, this day is never going to end. 

He sends out frantic e-mails and private Tweets to anyone he can think of, and the return-message pings of his phone join the symphony of alert sounds as everyone else’s contacts start getting back to them. The mechanism for using music to free a human from possession by a malevolent spirit is centuries-old and well-documented, but everyone tells him the same thing: you need to somehow find the right melody to serve as the key, a melody that means something to the possessing spirit, and you need power. So much power.

At some point, Cathy goes back to her own house to sleep for a few hours, and Mike dad-faces the Freds into putting their heads down for a while. The guest room has a double bed which no one even bothers pretending Bruno and Boots aren’t going to share. Boots sets both of their phone alarms, because, safe, and no one hears from them for a while.

Adam accepts the living room couch and a faded green quilt that smells like very old lemon Pledge, but firmly resolves not to sleep. Mike has gently taken away his laptop, but he still has his phone. He can keep combing through the archives of successful music-based exorcisms, keep reading the notes about which melodies have been used and how the ritual was fuelled, keep looking, keep trying...

A hand clamps over his mouth at the same time as someone takes his phone away. “Shut _up_ ,” someone hisses. “You’re going to wake her up.”

He opens his eyes and tumbles, quilt and all, off the couch into Bugs Potter’s arms.

\-----

They go out to the porch, where they can talk without being heard if they’re quiet. Bugs has brought two Dunkies iced lattes, sweating plastic cups with the stupid new logo on them, and they sit side-by-side on the steps with their shoulders touching. He’s remembered that Adam takes his latte with skim milk and no sugar.

“This was not how I meant for this to go,” Bugs says at last.

“Me neither.” Adam has thought of this often, what it would be like if they saw each other again. There had been that one kiss, at the end of the festival in Toronto, and then they had gotten into separate cars. And after that there had been e-mails, and occasional phone calls, and a lot of time to wonder what it would be like when they were just a little older, old enough to travel somewhere to meet each other with no teachers and no families, just them and a hotel room.

Except they had never gotten that far. Just before his seventeenth birthday, Adam had summoned up his courage and put some of that wondering into a particularly...passionate e-mail. It’s possible he’d been reading a little too much fanfic when he wrote it. He’d deleted it after he sent it, had never dared to try to get it back, so to this day he’s not entirely sure what it was he put into it that turned the tide. All he knows is that after he sent it, the e-mails he got from Bugs might have been written to a stranger. 

“Does anyone else still call you Bugs?” It’s not meant as a serious question, just something to stall for time until he can think of something better to say. 

“Nope. It’s been Dave since…” Bugs--Dave?--trails off. “I stopped introducing myself as Bugs when I stopped e-mailing you.”

He’s not going to get a better opening. “Bugs. Dave. What happened? Why’d you stop?”

“What else was I supposed to do?” Dave turns to look at him, finally. 

“Do about what?” Adam is definitely missing something here.

“What the fuck do you think?” Dave looks around guiltily at the bright clean quiet morning, at the houses full of sleeping families, and lowers his voice. “That last e-mail you sent.”

“Oh.” The morning is suddenly a lot less bright. “I’m sorry if it was...I mean. When we kissed goodbye after the festival. I kind of thought you felt, I mean, _we felt_ , we...but, I mean, we hadn’t known each very long, so I thought maybe I was wrong and I didn’t say anything then. And then I didn’t change my mind, so...and I hoped you didn’t either, so that e-mail was--”

He has to stop then because Dave is kissing him.

A little while later, Adam is half-sprawled on the porch steps, his head pillowed on Dave’s lap. They have finished their coffee, the cold and bitterness no more than a memory on Adam’s lips.

“I tried not to think about you like that, after Toronto,” says Dave. “All I could think about was what if I Charmed you.” His fingers stroke Adam’s hair, once, twice. “They teach us about that, you know? How dangerous it is. And it was worse because I knew how bad it scared you.”

“I couldn’t be scared of you, not ever.” 

Dave chuckles. It doesn’t come out quite right. “You’re doing better than me, Adam. I’m scared of me. All the time.”

Adam remembers Dave at sixteen, remembers his intensity, his wildness, his impossible talent. He had been Bugs because he could, he had been so terrified of his own power, he had kept pushing and pushing because he wanted to find out where the limits were. He had wanted to know if there were limits.

Bugs will only ever use his powers for good. Adam needs to believe that.

Right now, in the early morning, the Longest Day finally over, he can. He does. 

 

\-----

They get interrupted by a very energetic three-year-old (“Uncle Dave!” _bonk_ ) and then by the arrival of Raymond and Cathy in a battered Honda Accord.

“You are such an _idiot_ ,” Cathy tells Adam as soon as she gets close enough not to have to yell. “Did you even _think_ to ask this one,” jerking her thumb back over her shoulder at Raymond, “if there was anything he could do to help?”

Adam hadn’t. In fairness, once they get inside--Cathy muttering irritably the entire time, Raymond ominously silent--Bruno and Boots are compelled to admit that it hadn’t occurred to them either. In further fairness, neither of them have slept with him (at least Adam devoutly hopes not) but that’s neither here nor there.

As it turns out, Raymond Jardine is pretty good at setting wards. However, he freely admits that this is probably beyond him. Mike pours him a cup of Cathy’s vile tea, which inexplicably he likes, and he circumnavigates the house anyways, with Diane in tow to act as an anchor. After that, he ties the wards to Cathy, the Freds, Katy, her parents, and Dave. Adam wonders if he’s the only person who notices that Raymond doesn’t attach the wards to himself.

“I have no idea if that will help. Can’t hurt, though.” Raymond dusts the last of the salt off his hands and drops onto the couch. “What’s next?”

The answer comes a few hours later. All three Freds are in the upstairs office. Adam isn’t sure what happens, exactly, only that one minute he’s on his chair, and the next minute he’s on the floor and so is Boots. His head aches, and Boots and Bruno look dizzy. 

All three of their phones ping simultaneously. Cathy’s number.

_WE WERE WRONG. IT KNOWS WHO WE ARE._

_IT’S COMING._

\-----

Boots goes to climb into the driver’s seat of Big Blue, and a hand clamps over his wrist.

“Your eyes are barely tracking,” Raymond tells him. “I may not be any kind of fancy API, but I can drive. Give me your keys.”

Adam hops into the front passenger seat and begins putting the pieces of his flute together, muttering the first of the ritual phrases for calming his mind and gathering his will. This, in the end, is how he got here. Being a good musician and having a good memory for melody is one thing, being the kind of person that restless spirits sometimes allow to see them is another, but this is the thing that he wouldn’t be an API if he couldn’t do.

When they reach Diane’s house, the front door is open. There’s a pair of broken glasses on the porch.

They find Diane first, lying just inside the door, and Mike further down the hall. Raymond kneels to check their pulse. “They’re fine. When they wake up, they and I are going to have a little talk about not telling me they already had other wards on Katy. I’ll look after them. Go!”

Adam and Bruno and Boots run down the hallway. The other door, the one they’ve never seen open, is flung wide.

Outside, there’s a small yard. Grass, trash cans, flowers. Katy, curled into a tiny ball at the edge of a flower bed, her eyes enormous.

Cathy and Dave, facing each other, eyes locked.

_WE WERE WRONG. IT KNOWS WHO WE ARE._

The thing currently wearing Dave like a costume turns its head to look at Adam.

“Sorry about grabbing your boyfriend, man,” says Dave’s voice. “It’s just been a really long while since I’ve seen anyone down here.” 

\-----

As soon as it breaks eye contact, Cathy dashes to the flowerbeds and sweeps Katy into her arms. It’s not about Katy, it was never about Katy, she was a distraction and an excuse, something it saw in Dave’s head.

_And whose head did it see Dave in?_

Adam’s, of course. Adam had wandered where he shouldn’t have gone, he knew he shouldn’t have gone alone. Who had he been thinking of? Who had he wished was with him? Bugs had been with him, there in the basement, there in his head, the powerful beautiful boy with the Charm that had fascinated and repelled Adam before he knew why. No wards, he hadn’t known he’d need any, and all the spirit in the basement had to do was pluck out Adam’s thoughts of Bugs and wait. 

Bugs had been powerful at sixteen, had been powerful when he’d gone to Boston to live and go to school. The thing in the basement had waited, waited for him to grow more powerful still, waited until something came along that he would risk himself to protect. 

Katy was a distraction. She was an excuse. She was...she is still at risk here. Adam glances quickly to where she is, and sees that Raymond has emerged into the yard and wrapped his arms around Cathy and Katy together. Raymond hadn’t tied Katy’s wards to himself. Of course he hadn’t. He knew someone needed to stand outside the effects the wards would have.

Dave drops to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. At the same moment, Bruno’s hand drops onto Adam’s shoulder, and several very unpleasant pieces drop into place in Adam’s mind. Half-remembered stories, the three of them cataclysmically drunk at three in the morning, Bruno and Boots telling stories of their boarding school years. Bruno’s impossible schemes that somehow, always, worked without getting either of them expelled. Boots’ watchfulness. Making sure Bruno only used his powers for good.

Katy and Dave are not the only people at risk here. They never were.

“This one would do,” says the thing, in Bruno’s voice now, deeper than Dave’s. “He was always afraid to tell you, you know. I’d rather have the drummer, but I’d take this one.”

“Not a chance, asshole.” Cathy yanks Adam away and faces Bruno. Behind her, Boots is hissing some kind of incantation. _”...kaan y’mei aleira, al k’nah veraleira…”_ It’s that coeur-maligne thing, the one Mala had them working on, the one that wound up in a do-not-touch box in the secure storage near South Station.

Adam has time to think _are you stupid that shit killed my plant_ and then he’s lifting his flute to his lips and opening his mind to the music. It works through him, as it always does. What makes him API is, in the end, the ability step back and let the music do what it’s supposed to do. 

In conjunction with whatever words Boots manages to find (and oh, how he hopes it’s the right ones this time) what the music is supposed to do, is open a door. Nothing more, nothing less.

A door swings both ways.

And Bruno’s own Charm, so much stronger than Adam had ever guessed, boots the basement spirit right through it and slams it after him. Scary lady with the candy, bring it on.

\-----

It works. Adam probably won’t ever be able to explain how--maybe it’s a good thing he’s left formalized academia behind him--but it works.

Dave is okay. Dave and Adam are okay. Dave has found a good therapist in Arlington who specializes in couples therapy for people with Charm. They’re figuring it out as they go along.

Katy is fine and won’t remember much of what happened. That’s not any kind of power, API or otherwise. That’s just normal being three. Raymond (now promoted to “Uncle Ray”) is taking the API accelerated course and complaining happily about wards that don’t fucking _incapacitate_ people, go right ahead and send Jardine new and terrifying kinds of invasive spirits, he enjoys it.

Bruno and Boots are still not talking about it. They have, however, found their own apartment. It only has one bedroom.

Cathy sits with the Freds at their corner table in the coffeehouse one afternoon in August and breaks the news that she has accepted a job in New York City.

“Take it up with API. They offered me a job on the communications staff in the New York office.” She drains the last of her double espresso. “Plus, there’s a team there that’s looking for a part-time fourth. The infestations in their part of town are getting totally out of control, and it’s not like Terminix is going to handle this stuff. Who are they going to call?”

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide, aurum! We've never met, but I'm a big Macdonald Hall fan and I liked your prompts. 
> 
> You mentioned that you were okay with other characters, so I hope it's okay that I borrowed some people from other Korman books. Mike Webster is from "I Want To Go Home", and Raymond Jardine and the Force of the Universe to which he frequently issues complaints is from "A Semester In The Life Of A Garbage Bag".
> 
> I've literally lost count of the other pop culture references that wound up in here. If you think you recognize something, you probably do. I particularly have to apologize to actor Stark Sands for stealing his name for a Bugs Potter-esque rock band.
> 
> Alert readers will notice that, in addition to being powered by caffeine, this story is in part a love letter to metro Boston. Quinobequin University (named after the original name for the Charles River) is not MIT, but it shares many of its physical features, including the riverbank location, the door marked "Department of Alchemy" in Building 4, and the iconic staircase at 77 Massachusetts Avenue. In my universe, Q U's main peer school is Miskatonic University, and its rival both in certain paranormal disciplines and in Division III athletics is Hudson University (familiar to Law and Order fans as "that school where all the murders happen"). 
> 
> Berklee College of Music, on the other hand, is real. Majoring in Rock Stardom is not really a thing, but Berklee has produced a large number of very famous people in various popular music fields.
> 
> South Station is the stop on the Red Line of the MBTA where you get off if you want to visit South Boston and the Seaport, of which Summer Street is a major artery. To my knowledge, there are no ghost detention facilities down there.
> 
> Fred's Coffeehouse is not real, but it is based in spirit on independent/small-chain coffeehouses such as 1369 in Cambridge's Inman Square. The likelihood of legally parking an oversized van on the street in a commercial area is also somewhat fantastical. I have no grudge against vegans. Similarly, I don't think there are really goth teenagers inventing plantkilling conlangs in Seattle. 
> 
> The rebranding of the iconic Dunkin' Donuts as just Dunkin, starting in 2019, is real, and it is stupid. Everyone still just calls them Dunkies anyways. Their iced lattes are okay.


End file.
